When the mobile apps don’t catch on.

Experienced developers were needed to meet the growing demand. Since these are not for the taking, Pinch turned to Team Rockstars. Rockstar Gerald Eersteling immediately got his hands on a great job: developing the Reformatorisch Dagblad’s news app. “The layout was our main focus,” he says. “The app had to resemble the NRC app previously developed by Pinch, using a technique that was both newly introduced to iOS and only available for iOS 13 and above. This meant we had to ensure that compositional layouts would also work on older versions of iOS.” The solution was to use an open source framework. This was not entirely without controversy. “We had a crash when rotating the app, for example. It was a spicy piece of work and a lot of evenings went into it. Especially the calculations were a challenge. For each news item, we had to tailor the layout for different screen sizes. This involved things like: how many articles fit on the screen, horizontally and vertically? How many columns are needed, even if the screen rotates? How much text fits in an article? But it worked: we made the new way of layout work on an older version of iOS.”

After this successful delivery, more big names were waiting. Like Thuisbezorgd and Qmusic. Features were added to this national radio station’s app, including support for Chromecast and specific push notifications. Meanwhile, Gerald spends a lot of time at Ahold, working on Albert Heijn’s app. “I developed a feature that allows content editors to put products and actions in the app as a preview, without it going live right away. And now I’m working on refreshing the homepage.”

“Roeland is very satisfied with the cooperation, “It is important that our developers have social skills. They have to be able to work together and have good communication skills, because they have a lot of contact with customers. The rockstars fit us well in that respect. They have a lot of energy; it splashes off and that is contagious.” Moreover, the developers get along well. “We have a good time together, but we also dare to speak to each other,” Gerald said. “I frequently hear: why don’t you try it differently? Very pleasant. And vice versa, I take back new ideas from other jobs. Moreover, the involvement is high: if you post a question, you have an answer in no time. We all feel responsible for what Pinch puts out. Even now that I’m at Ahold a lot, I still drop by the office regularly. I really feel a strong connection.”